D'log

Feel the Bass:Staffordshire-based Bass Beer company have set up a creative web showcase, redism. It’s open to anyone, and there are monthly themes set by guest curators. The current show is ‘Portrait Photography’. Congratulations to a West Midlands company for digging into its pockets and funding something like this. And yes; their current cover photo […]

Can you hear me, mother?:Dialogue are inviting artists to send very-short e-mails or SMS mobile-phone messages, which will be routed to a voice-encoder and spoken aloud to the crowd in the cafe at the Watershed arts centre in Bristol. e-mail: formality@watershed.co.uk It runs from today until 3rd May.

Painting by numbers:A Chicago economist has written a book which analyses the artistic avante-garde from the 1890s to the 1960s, as if it were just another industry. Also over in the USA they’re planning a set of statistical indicators to measure the outputs and inputs of the Humanities. “So you spent the whole day just […]

I’m selling my camera :My camera : Fuji Finepix MX-2700, a 2.3 megapixel digital camera . Flash, auto-focus, video-out capability. Cool design & slim “shirt pocket” size; carry it everywhere! Lovely colour sensitivity. Plus a 16Mb SmartMedia card, rechargable battery & UK recharger unit, and an FD-A2 Floppy Disk Adapter. All in good working order, […]

Jumpin’ Jack:The groundbreaking publisher of hit “booze, Becks and bonking” men’s magazine Loaded has stuck his finger in the air. No, not in a laddish ‘one-fingered salute’. In order to sense the shifts many of the nation’s males are undoubtedly making. And he’s come up with the outline of his new magazine formula. It’s to […]

Tasty:birminghamplus is Birmingham’s restaurant / cafe / chippie / pub / foodie reviews site. It was re-designed and purged two weeks ago. Yes, purged. People submitting reviews now have to register; because unscrupulous nosh-shops were trying to skewer their competitors with fake reviews. Nice clean design (though some of the text’s line-wrapping is odd), it […]

Nu txt:With 80 percent of the population owning a mobile phone, the Motorola company commissioned Birmingham’s Sadie Plant to work out “how we use phones”; in the hope of identifying market segements which are not yet addressed. Sadie’s new report is called On The Mobile (PDF, 1.3Mb). In pubs and clubs, both men and women […]

As You Like It:The dear old alma-mater, the University of Birmingham, is putting the complete works of William Shakespeare online. The site will launch on Tues 23rd April; Shakespeare’s official birthday and St. George’s Day. If you can’t wait; Project Gutenberg got there first, albeit with an “old” version. And if you fancy something a […]

Panic on the streets of Birmingham:Oh, my gawd; ‘Moz rises from the dead, shock!’. Thought to have been biting his pillow in some darkened Los Angeles beach-hut for the last several years, Morrissey has suddenly returned to the land of the living. He’s been awarded the Number One slot (rightly) in the grand all-time NME […]

Dragonfly/dinosaur:When I see the heavyweight sources to be found via Ingenta and Free Electronic Journals I begin to wonder if bloggers are (metaphorically) like prehistoric dragonflies, zipping from flower to flower, blissfully unware that we’re dodging around huge clumpy dinosaurs which spend their entire lives ruminating on a single sub-species of plant. Ok, Academii Brontoborus […]

At last!:Apple launches the iToilet! Minus 20:At the back end of last year there was a call for work for ‘minus 20’ from London’s e-2, for a digital-art show containing only works less than 20kb in size. The results are now online. Some are just ho-hum revamped linear video-art (Vickey Isley and others), but others […]

Turned out nice again:After all the blog-focussed stuff of the last week, I’m going to be very British and talk about the weather. Lovely and mild, isn’t it? No rain for weeks. The sunshine was just right for the Queen Mum and the Easter holiday. Thanks; I feel better for that. Normal service will now […]

Blog Yahoo:Yesterday I linked to DayPop, a ‘Google of weblogs’, which actively spiders & indexes the full text of 1000s of blogs. Today I found another. But this one’s more like a ‘Yahoo of blogs’; EatonWeb Portal indexes a short text description of over 4000 blogs, and also allows you to filter blogs by their […]

Procreate:Birmingham’s deep-house producer’s record label, Procreation, has an empty gallery-page; which looks like it needs filling by some raw Midlands talent. Possibly yours. Gosh; I just had a horrible thought. It must be so depressing and frustrating being one of the many fine artists who are technophobic and who “don’t do” the internet; making good […]

Red pen time:I’m marking BIAD dissertations at the moment, with cheery titles like God and Satan in Commercial Cinema. Large amounts of chocolate & coffee. And a six-pack of red ink Bic pens. Warning:I’m owed money by TV company chxp.co.uk – and I didn’t get paid. So this text will show up on search-engines to […]

Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mother. 1900-2002

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New new-media talent:Tasty new site of personal new-media, photography and web-design work from BIAD graduate Ben, who’s from Sheffield but who’s decided to be based in Birmingham. Obviously the Brummie air works wonders with the creative juices 🙂 Don’t miss Ben’s Phlumix VJ software, currently in a version 2.0 beta (6.6Mb). Ben & his mates […]

Japan insight:GMT Plus 9, a daily arts & creatives links blog from Osaka, Japan. That’s the Japanese equivalent of Birmingham. 🙂 The site’s in English.